Good day.
I recently purchased a 4 port NIC card. My goal was to bridge 2 of the port for data/file transfers, and bridge 2 other ports for docker services. Leaving the NIC on the motherboard for management.
I figure for a small home setup it would be overkill, but if I am building something, I would build it right.
My biggest fear was actually the “no name” NIC card, I didn’t want to spend the $$$ for an Intel NIC, and figured it was good enough. So when the card was recognized and showed up in the dashboard, I was pleasantly surprised.
For clarity, I installed the card, attached all the Cat6 cables, connected all the Cat6 to the switch, and only then did I sit down at the dashboard. (That will be relevant in a second.)
I should have realized something was wrong when for the individual ports, I could not set the IP addresses like I did for the management port (enp3s0). All I got was a road block after road block.
From the shell I used:
ip address
lspci
...
Everything seem “fine”, but things were off, things were not initializing. I went ahead and made the bonded pair anyways, because that seem to work. Now when I say it worked, and did not work, I mean the actual configuration actual took. Every time I hit saved, it “save” and closed the pop-up, but when I open it again, all the fields are blank. So the fact the bonded config took, I saw it as progress. The managed port I set to static IP address. Again I can access the dashboard so that clearly works, but I could not bring up none of the other ports or initialize. I couldn’t bring up the bridge either. I even tried DHCP in case I was entering some thing wrong. 25+ using Linux, and configuring servers, but hey we all can make mistakes. But still with DHCP nothing initializes.
Now for the weird part, and what I think leading to the overall problem.
I get an ALERT that there is no cable connected. !?!?!
Like I mention, all five cables were attached.
- I switched the manage port cable and one of the other ports, multiple time. Manage port always came back up.
- I switch the ports on the switch, multiple times, to a multitude of other ports.
- I switched one of the “none working” cables with a known working cable and port.
Nothing that I have tried has resulted in any progress. I am completely out of ideas.
Any and all suggestion or ideas are welcome. Short of dancing in a circle tapping my head while rubbing my belly. But would consider an exorcism at this point, it is clearly possessed.
(For clarity, I tried to include screenshots but “Sorry, you can’t embed media items in a post”, I am guessing it is because it is a new account and has not been verified. In any case I can try and add supporting information at a later time.)